News

Is Tiger Woods Good or Bad for You?

There is a more and more insistent question being asked by right-thinking people about why we dwell so obsessively on the domestic problems of celebrities. It's an issue we debate all the time at Newser, where we dwell with quite some verve on these matters: How much is too much? At Newser, mindful of right-thinking sensitivities, we provide a sliding bar that lets you emphasize the serious and consequential and minimize the meretricious and trivial—but almost no one chooses to do so.

If there is reason to question the massive amount of celebrity coverage, there may be an even greater question about the coverage of would-be, or never-were, or used-to-almost-be celebrities—for instance, Barry Williams, who once played Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch, who, I read on Newser, has taken out a restraining order against a knife-wielding girlfriend.

Now I suppose one thing we learn from Tiger Woods' travails is that, even with his billion dollars and supernatural talent and seemingly lovely wife, he's got problems, too—that's leveling. But how satisfying can it be to find out Barry Williams is all screwed up?

I have sometimes thought that the great celebrity pile-on is a kind of replacement in the news business for funny pages. Celebrity bad behavior, after all, is a relative relief from cataclysmic news; it provides, too, like a good comic strip, an ongoing saga in a disconnected world; plus there are simple and clear-cut good guys and bad; what's more, we all share these stories with each other as our grandparents might have shared a chuckle about Dagwood and Blondie.